The Decision challenge now increases mission length by 200% per level.

The Manifestations of Destruction challenge now also adds chance to encounter apparitions.

Added apparition, new enemy for The Manifestations of Destruction challenge.

Flow Stagnation challenge now also increases ether cost of abilities that have base ether cost of 0.

Re-balanced difficulty rewards.

This update also features small, but important change - now before starting new game it's possible to choose starter spaceship!You can choose from two starter spaceships - apocalypse class spaceship and carrier class spaceship.

Other two spaceships will be available when nomad and titan classes will be added to game.

Next week I am going try to fix modular difficulty system.Apparently modular difficulty system doesn't make game that hard and gives too good rewards!

If I'll fix modular difficulty system in time, I will release new Sector Six version next weekend.

When modular difficulty system will be fixed, I will make story mission V, that will be at least 4 times longer than story mission IV! It will also feature boss fight, that will change based on your actions during mission.

In other news, I have finally bought controller!I will start working on controller support after story mission V.

Modular difficulty system is now live!You can now increase difficulty of the missions and earn rewards for beating them!

Before starting the mission, now you're taken to mission overview screen. There you can enable different challenges that make mission harder.

You can:

Increase damage enemies deal.

Increase enemy armour.

Add chance to encounter dreadnoughts.

Increase chance to encounter modified enemies.

Choose to be bombarded by bombardment stations.

Choose to lose all earned parts and experience if you fail to complete the mission.

Increase mission length.

Increase ether cost of abilities.

You can enable as much challenges as you want.​​More challenges means that you will get more and higher grade parts/amplifiers if you will complete mission!

No need to worry about not being able to hold so much parts and amplifiers!Now inventory becomes bigger when you fill it up!Additionally, new inventory supports item stacking, you can have hundreds of amplifiers and fill just few inventory slots.

Keep in mind that while inventory is infinite, you cannot start missions if you have more than three inventory pages.​Pages disappear if you empty them.

The last big change of this update is the return of the modified enemies!

You now have chance to encounter enemies with sniper weapons, doubled armour, doubled damage, ether draining and swarmlings inside!

Modified enemies drop optimized and advanced parts.

List of other changes:​

Replaced +x weapon damage part property with +x% damage property.

Now there's one unleash chance part property instead of 4.

Added Amplifier XV that gives part +3% ability unleash chance.

Added Amplifier XVI that gives part +5 aggression.

Added Amplifier XVII that gives part +5 resistance.

Added Amplifier XVIII that gives part +5 mastery.

Added Amplifier XIX that gives part +5 capacity.

Removed laser ink, because it wasn't useful and wasn't working properly.

This week I was shaping modular difficulty system!​It took me many hours, but have managed to make mission overview into something I can tolerate.

​Eight icons are modular difficulty system modules or challenges.Enabling them changes image between challenges and mission description.That image is difficulty map, it's a visual representation of modular difficulty system.

The (almost finished) mission overview

Enabling challenges is actually your hero deciding to take more dangerous paths, with anomalies and powerful enemies. Difficulty map shows those dangerous paths.

Here's the updated list of challenges:

Lethal WeaponsMinions will deal 50% more damage

Aberrant ArmourMinions will have 100% more armour

The Manifestations of DestructionYou will encounter dreadnoughts

The Assault of the ModifiedYou will encounter more modified minions

The Rain of FireYou will be bombarded every 10 seconds until you will destroy bombardment station

Risk for RewardEarned parts and experience will be lost if you will fail the mission

The DecisionMission objective count will be increased by 100%

Flow StagnationAbilities will cost 100% more ether during this mission

Some of these challenges can be used more than once.For example, you can use Aberrant Armour to make enemies have 500% more armour!

​After making mission overview, I implemented rewards and began implementing challenges.

I have implemented four of the challenges already, four more to go.

When they will be implemented, I will be testing and balancing modular difficulty system to make sure it can't be exploited too much.

I will also increase power of some abilities!I can now decrease difficulty of base game, those players who will want difficulty will be able to get more than enough of it through modular difficulty system.

When I began working on Sector Six, I didn't knew that it would become this big.

​I didn't knew that Sector Six is going to be in Steam, I didn't knew that it will get so much positive feedback, I didn't knew that one day I will write 50th development blog a.k.a. echo about it.

But it all happened and it's amazing!

So, how did it began?

In 2014, after finishing my first game, I immediately began working on Sector Seven. I had the idea of allowing player to build spaceships out of destructible blocks. Two months later Sector Seven was finished. It was weird, clunky, pretentious shoot 'em up with light RPG elements and many, many problems.

But I glad I made it, because without out it, there would be no Sector Six.

I promised myself that I would make Sector Seven sequel. Later I have decided not to, but then...

One quiet summer morning I woke up with weird images in my mind. It was epic black spaceship silhouettes and I knew they were built out many blocks.

I created new project file, called Shadow Sector the same day. Later I decided to call it Sector Six.

In the beginning, I didn't worked on Sector Six much, I was focusing on my other game, Lur. Just like Sector Seven, it wasn't a good game, but while making it, I got experience, that I needed to make Sector Six.

I have finished Lur on January 2015, redirected my focus on Sector Six and intense development began.

Back then Sector Six was similar to Sector Seven. There was no inventory, blocks were simply bought for currency. Those blocks didn't had any stats and they were destroyed on hit. Lose all blocks and game is over.

Back then I was playing Path of Exile and Torchlight. So another idea hit me. What if blocks had random stats and you could get them by killing enemies? I already knew how to make inventory and generate random loot from Lur, so I decided to give it a try. And it worked!

Oldest Sector Six screenshot I have

When I finally made Sector Six playable, I have uploaded first alpha version. After Sector Seven and Lur I didn't expect anything, so I was surprised when Sector Six received good comments and ratings. I knew that I can improve the game, so positive feedback about the alpha version made me really excited about the future of Sector Six. And I began working on Sector Six like crazy!

With modified enemies in, I can work on modular difficulty system! It should take me one, maybe two weeks to finish and then I'll update the game, hopefully it will happen this month!

After modular difficulty system... Well, there was massive interface update, massive combat update, massive graphical update... Now it's time for massive story update! After modular difficulty system I will be working on story missions. A lot of them!

Last week I have improved amplifiers, improved part and map tooltips, changed several part properties and fixed problems with the holy thunder.

Amplifiers are items, that are used to upgrade spaceship parts. Currently they can be found if hard mode is enabled. When modular difficulty system will be added, amplifiers will be rewarded in large numbers, so I made them stack.

Now that Sector Six inventory allows stack-able items, making crafting system will be a lot easier!

As the amplifier XV hints, now instead of four unleash chances, there's just one for all abilities. This should highly reduce chance of getting useless parts!

The +x weapon damage property on parts have changed as well. It has been replaced with less confusing +x% damage. Add part with +10% damage property to your ship and you'll deal 10% more damage.

Since the beta launch, several players had trouble with what I call holy thunder, that's those missiles that fall when you get away from the enemies.I have made them more user friendly, now when you leave enemy range, you have half second to return to the enemy range, this should help to not get punished by the holy thunder.

Also it's no longer possible to trigger next enemy group to barrage you by getting very close to enemy you're currently fighting.

The last thing I worked on was the tooltips. Just a few minor improvements!

This week I am going to work on modified enemies!

The idea is to take currently existing enemies and modify them by adding destructible parts. Tanks with repairing pylons, dreadnoughts with regeneration hubs, acolytes with sniper weapons, heavies with armour strengtheners... This will be fun*!

Now when you fill the inventory, it becomes bigger, that means items will never be lost because there’s not enough space in the inventory!

Filling inventory creates new inventory page. Removing all items from last inventory page, deletes that inventory page. And there’s a limitation – if you want to start new mission, you cannot have more than 3 inventory pages. The inventory is infinite, but your computer’s power is not!

After more than 10 pages created, FPS severely drops when adding the new item to the inventory, this should be even worse for the slower computers.

I could probably optimize inventory system to allow having 100 and more pages without any lag, but I would need to completely rewrite inventory system and I don’t want to do that. It would take a lot of time and 3 inventory pages – that’s 198 slots! – is more than enough, for now.

I wanted to make inventory kind-of-infinite, because the modular difficulty system will reward player with a lot of items at the end of the mission.

Here is the challenges that the modular difficulty system will offer:

Armoured MinionsMinions will have 50% more armour.

Deadly MinionsMinions will deal 25% more damage.

Deadly Encounters​You will have a chance to encounter dreadnoughts.

The Assault of the ModifiedThere will be more modified minions.

The Rain of Fire​Every 10 seconds the missile will be fired at you from the bombardment station. Find and destroy bombardment station to stop this.

Risk for RewardXP and parts earned in this mission will be lost, if your spaceship will be destroyed.

If you have never enabled hard mode - amplifiers are the items that you can use to upgrade spaceship parts. Upgrading makes the part as powerful as the part from the next tier. E,g,: upgraded generic part is like normal optimized part.

Of course, this is just a plan, just a bunch of ideas, so I don’t really know how will this look in the end! But I hope as cool as I imagine it now!

Next week I will continue improving inventory and items.

I will make amplifiers stack-able, I will make amplifiers for properties that don’t have amplifiers yet, I will merge apocalypse/carrier/goliath/nomad ability unleash chances into universal ability unleash chance, I will improve tooltips and maybe I will even start working on the modified enemies. (Does anyone remember sniper veterans?) After all that, I will be ready to work on the modular difficulty system!

Graphical update is here!I proudly present one of the most game changing updates in Sector Six history!It is also the last alpha update - with it Sector Six enters beta!

New backgrounds

Sector Six backgrounds have received many improvements – now they behave more realistically, give better illusion of depth and look more interesting because of the color layer.New backgrounds have been added for every region and existing ones were improved.

New animations

New animations has been added for actions that previously had no animations.This includes part installing, region entering and ability upgrading animations.

Combat improvements

Combat is now more fun! Projectiles have better particles, Missile Strike, Spread Mines and Death From Above abilities are faster, dreadnoughts attack only higher level players and are encountered less often, escort missions are less annoying, retreat exploit is fixed and so on!

Interface improvements

I have cleaned up ability interface, moved combat HUD armour, alloy and ether bars closer to the center of the screen, added loot box to the mission results interface, updated floating text system and improved part placing code, now placing parts in the building field is easier.

​Beta

Now that alpha is finally over, there will be a lot more content updates!This should be the most interesting development phase, First beta update will be modular difficulty system and infinite inventory.Modular difficulty system will allow players to make game harder for rewards, that will allow them to make game ever harder!